Mission Impossible: Hardening Android for Security and Privacy

Executive Summary

The future is here, and ahead of schedule. Come join us, the weather's nice.

This blog post describes the installation and configuration of a prototype of a secure, full-featured, Android telecommunications device with full Tor support, individual application firewalling, true cell network baseband isolation, and optional ZRTP encrypted voice and video support. ZRTP does run over UDP which is not yet possible to send over Tor, but we are able to send SIP account login and call setup over Tor independently.

The SIP client we recommend also supports dialing normal telephone numbers if you have a SIP gateway that provides trunking service.

Aside from a handful of binary blobs to manage the device firmware and graphics acceleration, the entire system can be assembled (and recompiled) using only FOSS components. However, as an added bonus, we will describe how to handle the Google Play store as well, to mitigate thetwo infamous Google Play Backdoors.

Android is the most popular mobile platform in the world, with a wide variety of applications, including many applications that aid in communications security, censorship circumvention, and activist organization. Moreover, the core of the Android platform is Open Source, auditable, and modifiable by anyone.

Unfortunately though, mobile devices in general and Android devices in particular have not been designed with privacy in mind. In fact, they've seemingly been designed with nearly the opposite goal: to make it easy for third parties, telecommunications companies, sophisticated state-sized adversaries, and even random hackers to extract all manner of personal information from the user. This includes the full content of personal communications with business partners and loved ones. Worse still, by default, the user is given very little in the way of control or even informed consent about what information is being collected and how.

This post aims to address this, but we must first admit we stand on the shoulders of giants. Organizations like Cyanogen, F-Droid, the Guardian Project, and many others have done a great deal of work to try to improve this situation by restoring control of Android devices to the user, and to ensure the integrity of our personal communications. However, all of these projects have shortcomings and often leave gaps in what they provide and protect. Even in cases where proper security and privacy features exist, they typically require extensive configuration to use safely, securely, and correctly.

This blog post enumerates and documents these gaps, describes workarounds for serious shortcomings, and provides suggestions for future work.

It is also meant to serve as a HOWTO to walk interested, technically capable people through the end-to-end installation and configuration of a prototype of a secure and private Android device, where access to the network is restricted to an approved list of applications, and all traffic is routed through the Tor network.

It is our hope that this work can be replicated and eventually fully automated, given a good UI, and rolled into a single ROM or ROM addon package for ease of use. Ultimately, there is no reason why this system could not become a full fledged off the shelf product, given proper hardware support and good UI for the more technical bits.

The remainder of this document is divided into the following sections:

If you truly wish to secure your mobile device from remote compromise, it is necessary to carefully select your hardware. First and foremost, it is absolutely essential that the carrier's baseband firmware is completely isolated from the rest of the platform. Because your cell phone baseband does not authenticate the network (in part to allow roaming), any random hacker with their own cell network can exploit these backdoors and use them to install malware on your device.

While there are projects underway to determine which handsets actually provide true hardware baseband isolation, at the time of this writing there is very little public information available on this topic. Hence, the only safe option remains a device with no cell network support at all (though cell network connectivity can still be provided by a separate device). For the purposes of this post, the reference device is the WiFi-only version of the 2013 Google Nexus 7 tablet.

For users who wish to retain full mobile access, we recommend obtaining a cell modem device that provides a WiFi access point for data services only. These devices do not have microphones and in some cases do not even have fine-grained GPS units (because they are not able to make emergency calls). They are also available with prepaid plans, for rates around $20-30 USD per month, for about 2GB/month of 4G data. If coverage and reliability is important to you though, you may want to go with a slightly more expensive carrier. In the US, T-Mobile isn't bad, but Verizon is superb.

To increase battery life of your cell connection, you can connect this access point to an external mobile USB battery pack, which typically will provide 36-48 hours of continuous use with a 6000mAh battery.

The total cost of a Wifi-only tablet with cell modem and battery pack is only roughly USD $50 more than the 4G LTE version of the same device.

In this way, you achieve true baseband isolation, with no risk of audio or network surveillance, baseband exploits, or provider backdoors. Effectively, this cell modem is just another untrusted router in a long, long chain of untrustworthy Internet infrastructure.

However, do note though that even if the cell unit does not contain a fine-grained GPS, you still sacrifice location privacy while using it. Over an extended period of time, it will be possible to make inferences about your physical activity, behavior and personal preferences, and your identity, based on cell tower use alone.

We will focus on the installation of Cyanogenmod 11 using Team Win Recovery Project, both to give this HOWTO some shelf life, and because Cyanogenmod 11 features full SELinux support (Dear NSA: What happened to you guys? You used to be cool. Well, some of you. Some of the time. Maybe. Or maybe not).

The use of Google Apps and Google Play services is not recommended due to security issues with Google Play. However, we do provide workarounds for mitigating those issues, if Google Play is required for your use case.

Installation and Setup: ROM and Core App Installation

With the 2013 Google Nexus 7 tablet, installation is fairly straight-forward. In fact, it is actually possible to install and use the device before associating it with a Google Account in any way. This is a desirable property, because by default, the otherwise mandatory initial setup process of the stock Google ROM sends your device MAC address directly to Google and links it to your Google account (all without using Tor, of course).

The official Cyanogenmod installation instructions are available online, but with a fresh out of the box device, here are the key steps for installation without activating the default ROM code at all (using Team Win Recovery Project instead of ClockWorkMod).

Because the download integrity for all of these packages is abysmal, here is a signed set of SHA256 hashes I've observed for those packages.

Once you have all of those packages, boot your tablet into fastboot mode by holding the Power button and the Volume Down button during a cold boot. Then, attach it to your desktop/laptop machine with a USB cable and run the following commands from a Linux/UNIX shell:

After the recovery firmware is flashed successfully, use the volume keys to select Recovery and hit the power button to reboot the device (or power it off, and then boot holding Power and Volume Up).

Once Team Win boots, go into Wipe and select Advanced Wipe. Select all checkboxes except for USB-OTG, and slide to wipe. Once the wipe is done, click Format Data. After the format completes, issue these commands from your Linux shell:

After this push process completes, go to the Install menu, and select the Cyanogen zip, and optionally the gapps zip for installation. Then click Reboot, and select System.

After rebooting into your new installation, skip all CyanogenMod and Google setup, disable location reporting, and immediately disable WiFi and turn on Airplane mode.

Then, go into Settings -> About Tablet and scroll to the bottom and click the greyed out Build number 5 times until developer mode is enabled. Then go into Settings -> Developer Options and turn on USB Debugging.

Now, it is time to encrypt your tablet. It is important to do this step early, as I have noticed additional apps and configuration tweaks can make this process fail later on.

We will also do this from the shell, in order to set a different password than your screen unlock pin. This is done to mitigate the risk of compromise of this password from shoulder surfers, and to allow the use of a much longer (and non-numeric) password that you would prefer not to type every time you unlock the screen.

To do this, open the Terminal app, and type the following commands:

su
vdc cryptfs enablecrypto inplace NewMoreSecurePassword

Watch for typos! That command does not ask you to re-type that password for confirmation.

Installation and Setup: Disabling Invasive Apps and Services

Before you configure the Firewall or enable the network, you likely want to disable at least a subset of the following built-in apps and services, by using Settings -> Apps -> All, and then clicking on each app and hitting the Disable button:

Ok, now let's install the firewall and tor support scripts. Go back into Settings -> Developer Options and enable USB Debugging and change Root Access to Apps and ADB. Then, unzip the android-firewall.zip on your laptop, and run the installation script:

./install-firewall.sh

That firewall installation provides several key scripts that provide functionality that is currently impossible to achieve with any app (including Orbot):

It disables "Google Captive Portal Detection", which involves connection attempts to Google servers upon Wifi assocation (these requests are made by the Android Settings UID, which should normally be blocked from the network, unless you are first registering for Google Play).

The main firewall-torify-all.sh Droidwall script also includes an input firewall, to block all inbound connections to the device. It also fixes a Droidwall permissions vulnerability

It installs an optional script to allow the Browser app to bypass Tor for logging into WiFi captive portals.

It installs an optional script to temporarily allow network adb access when you need it (if you are paranoid about USB exploits, which you should be).

It provides an optional script to allow the UDP activity of LinPhone to bypass Tor, to allow ZRTP-encrypted Voice and Video SIP/VoIP calls. SIP account login/registration and call setup/signaling can be done over TCP, and Linphone's TCP activity is still sent through Tor with this script.

Note that with the exception of the userinit network blocking script, installing these scripts does not activate them. You still need to configure Droidwall to use them.

We use Droidwall instead of Orbot or AFWall+ for five reasons:

Droidwall's app-based firewall and Orbot's transproxy are known to conflict and reset one another.

Droidwall does not randomly drop transproxy rules when switching networks (Orbot has had several of these types of bugs).

Unlike AFWall+, Droidwall is able to auto-launch at "boot" (though still not before the network and Android Services come online and make connections).

AFWall+'s "fix" for this startup data leak problem does not work on Cyanogenmod (hence our userinit script instead).

Aside from the permissions issue fixed by our firewall-torify-all.sh script, AFWall+ provides no additional security fixes over the stock Droidwall.

To make use of the firewall scripts, open up Droidwall and hit the config button (the vertical three dots), go to More -> Set Custom Script. Enter the following:

NOTE: You must not make any typos in the above. If you mistype any of those files, things may break. Because the userinit.sh script blocks all network at boot, if you make a typo in the torify script, you will be unable to use the Internet at all!

Also notice that these scripts have been installed into a readonly root directory. Because they are run as root, installing them to a world-writable location like /sdcard/ is extremely unwise.

Later, if you want to enable one of network adb, LinPhone UDP, or captive portal login, go back into this window and remove the leading comment ('#') from the appropriate lines (this is obviously one of the many aspects of this prototype that could benefit from real UI).

Then, configure the apps you want to allow to access the network. Note that the only Android system apps that must access the network are:

CM Updater

Downloads, Media Storage, Download Manager

F-Droid

Orbot's network access is handled via the main firewall-torify-all.sh script. You do not need to enable full network access to Orbot in Droidwall.

The rest of the apps you can enable at your discretion. They will all be routed through Tor automatically.

Once Droidwall is configured, you can click on the Menu (three dots) and click the "Firewall Disabled" button to enable the firewall. Then, you can enable Orbot. Do not grant Orbot superuser access. It still opens the transproxy ports you need without root, and Droidwall is managing installation of the transproxy rules, not Orbot.

You are now ready to enable Wifi and network access on your device. For vulnerability surface reduction, you may want to use the Advanced Options -> Static IP to manually enter an IP address for your device to avoid using dhclient. You do not need a DNS server, and can safely set it to 127.0.0.1.

If you installed the Google Apps zip, you need to do a few things now to set it up, and to further harden your device. If you opted out of Google Apps, you can skip to the next section.

Google Apps Setup: Initializing Google Play

The first time you use Google Play, you will need to enable four apps in Droidwall: "Google Account Manager, Google Play Services...", "Settings, Dev Tools, Fused Location...", "Gmail", and "Google Play" itself.

If you do not have a Google account, your best bet is to find open wifi to create one, as Google will often block accounts created through Tor, even if you use an Android device.

After you log in for the first time, you should be able to disable the "Google Account Manager, Google Play Services...", "Gmail", and the "Settings..." apps in Droidwall, but your authentication tokens in Google Play may expire periodically. If this happens, you should only need to temporarily enable the "Google Account Manager, Google Play Services..." app in Droidwall to obtain new ones.

Google Apps Setup: Mitigating the Google Play Backdoors

If you do choose to use Google Play, you need to be very careful about how you allow it to access the network. In addition to the risks associated with using a proprietary App Store that can send you targeted malware-infected packages based on your Google Account, it has at least two major user experience flaws:

Anyone who is able to gain access to your Google account can silently install root or full permission apps without any user interaction what-so-ever. Once installed, these apps can retroactively clear what little installation notification and UI-based evidence of their existence there was in the first place.

The Android Update Process does not inform the user of changes in permissions of pending update apps that happen to get installed after an Android upgrade.

The first issue can be mitigated by ensuring that Google Play does not have access to the network when not in use, by disabling it in Droidwall. If you do not do this, apps can be installed silently behind your back. Welcome to the Google Experience.

For the second issue, you can install the SecCheck utility, to monitor your apps for changes in permissions during a device upgrade.

Google Apps Setup: Disabling Google Cloud Messaging

The Google Cloud Messaging Service allows apps to register for asynchronous remote push notifications from Google, as well as send outbound messages through Google.

Notification registration and outbound messages are sent via the app's own UID, so using Droidwall to disable network access by an app is enough to prevent outbound data, and notification registration. However, if you ever allow network access to an app, and it does successfully register for notifications, these notifications can be delivered even when the app is once again blocked from accessing the network by Droidwall.

These inbound notifications can be blocked by disabling network access to the "Google Account Manager, Google Play Services, Google Services Framework, Google Contacts Sync" in Droidwall. In fact, the only reason you should ever need to enable network access by this service is if you need to log in to Google Play again if your authentication tokens ever expire.

If you would like to test your ability to control Google Cloud Messaging, there are two apps in the Google Play store than can help with this. GCM Test allows for simple send and receive pings through GCM. Push Notification Tester will allow you to test registration and asynchronous GCM notification.

Xabber is a full Java implementation of XMPP, and supports both OTR and Tor. Its UI is a bit more streamlined than Guardian Project's ChatSecure, and it does not make use of any native code components (which are more vulnerable to code execution exploits than pure Java code). Unfortunately, this means it lacks some of ChatSecure's nicer features, such as push-to-talk voice and file transfer.

Despite better protection against code execution, it does have several insecure default settings. In particular, you want to make the following changes:

Notifications -> Message text in Notifications -> Off (notifications can be read by other apps!)

Offline Calendar is a hack to allow you to create a fake local Google account that does not sync to Google. This allows you to use the Calendar App without risk of leaking your activities to Google. Note that you must exempt both this app and Calendar from Privacy Guard for it to function properly.

ostel.co is a free SIP service run by the Guardian Project that supports only TLS and ZRTP, but does not allow outdialing to normal PSTN telephone numbers. While Bitcoin has many privacy issues of its own, the Bitcoin community maintains a couplelists of "trunking" providers that allow you to obtain a PSTN phone number in exchange for Bitcoin payment.

Plumble is a Mumble client that will route voice traffic over Tor, which is useful if you would like to communicate with someone over voice without revealing your IP to them, or your activity to a local network observer. However, unlike Linphone, voice traffic is not end-to-end encrypted, so the Mumble server can listen to your conversations.

K-9 Mail and APG
K-9 Mail is a POP/IMAP client that supports TLS and integrates well with APG, which will allow you to send and receive GPG-encrypted mail easily. Before using it, you should be aware of two things: It identifies itself in your mail headers, which opens you up to targeted attacks specifically tailored for K-9 Mail and/or Android, and by default it includes the subject of messages in mail notifications (which is bad, because other apps can read notifications). There is a privacy option to disable subject text in notifications, but there is no option to disable the user agent in the mail headers.

The VLC port in F-Droid is a fully capable media player. It can play mp3s and most video formats in use today. It is a handy, private alternative to Google Music and other closed-source players that often report your activity to third party advertisers. VLC does not need network access to function.

We do not yet have a port of Tor Browser for Android (though one is underway -- see the Future Work section). Unless you want to use Google Play to get Chrome, Firefox is your best bet for a web browser that receives regular updates (the built in Browser app does not). HTTPS-Everywhere and NoScript are available, at least.

The Launch App Ops app is a simple shortcut into the hidden application permissions editor in Android. A similar interface is available through Settings -> Privacy -> Privacy Guard, but a direct shortcut to edit permissions is handy. It also displays some additional system apps that Privacy Guard omits.

Permissions
The Permissions app gives you a view of all Android permissions, and shows you which apps have requested a given permission. This is particularly useful to disable the record audio permission for apps that you don't want to suddenly decide to listen to you. (Interestingly, the Record Audio permission disable feature was broken in all Android ROMs I tested, aside from Cyanogenmod 11. You can test this yourself by revoking the permission from the Sound Recorder app, and verifying that it cannot record.)

In addition to being supercute, CatLog is an excellent Android monitoring and debugging tool. It allows you to monitor and record the full set of Android log events, which can be helpful in diagnosing issues with apps.

Intent Intercept allows you to inspect and extract Android Intent content without allowing it to get forwarded to an actual app. This is useful for monitoring how apps attempt to communicate with eachother, though be aware it only covers one of the mechanisms of inter-app communication in Android.

Now that your device is fully configured and installed, you probably want to know how to back it up without sending all of your private information directly to Google. While the Team Win Recovery Project will back up all of your system settings and apps (even if your device is encrypted), it currently does not back up the contents of your virtualized /sdcard. Remembering to do a couple adb pulls of key directories can save you a lot of heartache should you suffer some kind of data loss or hardware failure (or simply drop your tablet on a bridge while in a rush to catch a train).

The backup.sh script uses adb to pull your Download and Pictures directories from the /sdcard, as well as pulls the entire TWRP backup directory.

Before you use that script, you probably want to delete old TWRP backup folders so as to only pull one backup, to reduce pull time. These live in /sdcard/TWRP/BACKUPS/, which is also known as /storage/emulated/0/TWRP/BACKUPS in the File Manager app.

To use this script over the network without a usb cable, enable both USB Debugging and ADB Over Network in your developer settings. The script does not require you to enable root access from adb, and you should not enable root because it takes quite a while to run a backup, especially if you are using network adb.

Prior to using network adb, you must edit your Droidwall custom scripts to allow it (by removing the '#' in the #. /data/local/firewall-allow-adb.sh line you entered earlier), and then run the following commands from a non-root Linux shell on your desktop/laptop (the ADB Over Network setting will tell you the IP and port):

killall adb
adb connect ip:5555

VERY IMPORTANT: Don't forget to disable USB Debugging, as well as the Droidwall adb exemption when you are done with the backup!

If you would really like to ensure that your device cannot listen to you even if it is exploited, it turns out it is very straight-forward to remove the built-in microphone in the Nexus 7. There is only one mic on the 2013 model, and it is located just below the volume buttons (the tiny hole).

To remove it, all you need to do is pop off the the back panel (this can be done with your fingernails, or a tiny screwdriver), and then you can shave the microphone right off that circuit board, and reattach the panel. I have done this to one of my devices, and it was subsequently unable to record audio at all, without otherwise affecting functionality.

You can still use apps that require a microphone by plugging in headphone headset that contains a mic built in (these cost around $20 and you can get them from nearly any consumer electronics store). I have also tested this, and was still able to make a Linphone call from a device with the built in microphone removed, but with an external headset. Note that the 2012 Nexus 7 does not support these combination microphone+headphone jacks (and it has a secondary microphone as well). You must have the 2013 model.

The 2013 Nexus 7 Teardown video can give you an idea of what this looks like before you try it. Again you do not need to fully disassemble the device - you only need to remove the back cover.

Pro-Tip: Before you go too crazy and start ripping out the cameras too, remember that you can cover the cameras with a sticker or tape when not in use. I have found that regular old black electrical tape applies seamlessly, is non-obvious to casual onlookers, and is easy to remove without smudging or gunking up the lenses. Better still, it can be removed and reapplied many times without losing its adhesive.

It turns out that the 2013 Wifi Nexus 7 does actually have a partition that contains a cell network baseband firmware on it, located on the filesystem as the block device /dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/radio. If you run strings on that block device from the shell, you can see that all manner of CDMA and GSM log messages, comments, and symbols are present in that partition.

According to ADB logs, Cyanogenmod 11 actually does try to bring up a cell network radio at boot on my Wifi-only Nexus 7, but fails due to it being disabled. There is also a strong economic incentive for Asus and Google to make it extremely difficult to activate the baseband even if the hardware is otherwise identical for manufacturing reasons, since they sell the WiFi-only version for $100 less. If it were easy to re-enable the baseband, HOWTOs would exist (which they do not seem to, at least not yet), and they would cut into their LTE device sales.

Even so, since we lack public schematics for the Nexus 7 to verify that cell components are actually missing or hardware-disabled, it may be wise to wipe this radio firmware as well, as defense in depth.

I have wiped that partition while the device was running without any issue, or any additional errors from ADB logs.

Note that an anonymous commenter also suggested it is possible to disable the baseband of a cell-enabled device using a series of Android service disable commands, and by wiping that radio block device. I have not tested this on a device other than the WiFI-only Nexus 7, though, so proceed with caution. If you try those steps on a cell-enabled device, you should archive a copy of your radio firmware first by doing something like the following from that dev directory that contains the radio firmware block device.

In addition to streamlining the contents of this post into a single additional Cyanogenmod installation zip or alternative ROM, the following problems remain unsolved.

Future Work: Better Usability

While arguably very secure, this system is obviously nowhere near usable. Here are some potential improvements to the user interface, based on a brainstorming session I had with another interested developer.

First of all, the AFWall+/Droidwall UI should be changed to be a tri-state: It should allow you to send app traffic over Tor, over your normal internet connection, or block it entirely.

Next, during app installation from either F-Droid or Google Play (this is an Intent another addon app can actually listen for), the user should be given the chance to decide if they would like that app's traffic to be routed over Tor, use the normal Internet connection, or be blocked entirely from accessing the network. Currently, the Droidwall default for new apps is "no network", which is a great default, but it would be nice to ask users what they would like to do during actual app installation.

Moreover, users should also be given a chance to edit the app's permissions upon installation as well, should they desire to do so.

The Google Play situation could also be vastly improved, should Google itself still prove unwilling to improve the situation. Google Play could be wrapped in a launcher app that automatically grants it network access prior to launch, and then disables it upon leaving the window.

A similar UI could be added to LinPhone. Because the actual voice and video transport for LinPhone does not use Tor, it is possible for an adversary to learn your SIP ID or phone number, and then call you just for the purposes of learning your IP. Because we handle call setup over Tor, we can prevent LinPhone from performing any UDP activity, or divulging your IP to the calling party prior to user approval of the call. Ideally, we would also want to inform the user of the fact that incoming calls can be used to obtain information about them, at least prior to accepting their first call from an unknown party.

Future Work: Find Hardware with Actual Isolated Basebands

Related to usability, it would be nice if we could have a serious community effort to audit the baseband isolation properties of existing cell phones, so we all don't have to carry around these ridiculous battery packs and sketch-ass wifi bridges. There is no engineering reason why this prototype could not be just as secure if it were a single piece of hardware. We just need to find the right hardware.

A random commenter claimed that the Galaxy Nexus might actually have exactly the type of baseband isolation we want, but the comment was from memory, and based on software reverse engineering efforts that were not publicly documented. We need to do better than this.

Future Work: Bug Bounty Program

If there is sufficient interest in this prototype, and/or if it gets transformed into a usable addon package or ROM, we may consider running a bug bounty program where we accept donations to a dedicated Bitcoin address, and award the contents of that wallet to anyone who discovers a Tor proxy bypass issue or remote code execution vulnerability in any of the network-enabled apps mentioned in this post (except for the Browser app, which does not receive security updates).

Future Work: Port Tor Browser to Android

The Guardian Project is undertaking a port of Tor Browser to Android as part of their OrFox project. This will greatly improve the privacy of your web browsing experience on the Android device over both Firefox and Chrome. We look forward to helping them in any way we can with this effort.

Future Work: WiFi MAC Address Randomization

It is actually possible to randomize the WiFi MAC address on the Google Nexus 7. The closed-source root app Mac Spoofer is able to modify the device MAC address using Qualcomm-specific methods in such a way that the entire Android OS becomes convinced that this is your actual MAC.

However, doing this requires installation of a root-enabled, closed-source application from the Google Play Store, which we believe is extremely unwise on a device you need to be able to trust. Moreover, this app cannot be autorun on boot, and your MAC address will also reset every time you disable the WiFi interface (which is easy to do accidentally). It also supports using only a single, manually entered MAC address.

Hardware-independent techniques (such as a the Terminal command busybox ifconfig wlan0 hw ether <mac>) appear to interfere with the WiFi management system and prevent it from associating. Moreover, they do not cause the Android system to report the new MAC address, either (visible under Settings -> About Tablet -> Status).

Obviously, an Open Source F-Droid app that properly resets (and automatically randomizes) the MAC every time the WiFi interface is brought up is badly needed.

Future Work: Disable Probes for Configured Wifi Networks

The Android OS currently probes for all of your configured WiFi networks while looking for open wifi to connect to. Configured networks should not be probed for explictly unless activity for their BSSID is seen. The xda-developers forum has a limited fix to change scanning behavior, but users report that it does not disable the active probing behavior for any "hidden" networks that you have configured.

Future Work: Recovery ROM Password Protection

An unlocked recovery ROM is a huge vulnerability surface for Android. While disk encryption protects your applications and data, it does not protect many key system binaries and boot programs. With physical access, it is possible to modify these binaries through your recovery ROM.

The ability to set a password for the Team Win recovery ROM in such a way that a simple "fastboot flash recovery" would overwrite would go a long way to improving device security. At least it would become evident to you if your recovery ROM has been replaced, in this case (due to the absence of the password).

It may also be possible to restore your bootloader lock as an alternative, but then you lose the ability to make backups of your system using Team Win.

Future Work: Disk Encryption via TPM or Clever Hacks

Unfortunately, even disk encryption and a secure recovery firmware is not enough to fully defend against an adversary with an extended period of physical access to your device.

Cold Boot Attacks are still very much a reality against any form of disk encryption, and the best way to eliminate them is through hardware-assisted secure key storage, such as through a TPM chip on the device itself.

It may also be possible to mitigate these attacks by placing key material in SRAM memory locations that will be overwritten as part of the ARM boot process. If these physical memory locations are stable (and for ARM systems that use the SoC SRAM to boot, they will be), rebooting the device to extract key material will always end up overwriting it. Similar ARM CPU-based encryption defenses have also been explored in the research literature.

Future Work: Download and Build Process Integrity

Beyond the download integrity issues mentioned above, better build security is also deeply needed by all of these projects. A Gitian descriptor that is capable of building Cyanogenmod and arbitrary F-Droid packages in a reproducible fashion is one way to go about achieving this property.

Future Work: Removing Binary Blobs

If you read the Cyanogenmod build instructions closely, you can see that it requires extracting the binary blobs from some random phone, and shipping them out. This is the case with most ROMs. In fact, only the Replicant Project seems concerned with this practice, but regrettably they do not support any wifi-only devices. This is rather unfortunate, because no matter what they do with the Android OS on existing cell-enabled devices, they will always be stuck with a closed source, backdoored baseband that has direct access to the microphone, if not the RAM and the entire Android OS.

Add pro-tip to the microphone removal section: Don't remove your cameras. Black electrical tape works just fine, and can be removed and reapplied many times without smudges.

Update android-firewall.zip installation and documentation to use /data/local instead of /etc. CM updates will wipe /etc, of course. Woops. If this happened to you while updating to CM-11-M5, download that new android-firewall.zip and run install-firewall.sh again as per the instructions above, and update your Droidwall custom script locations to use /data/local.

Update the Future work section to describe some specific UI improvements.

Update the Future work section to mention that we need to find hardware with actual isolated basebands. Duh. This should have been in there much earlier.

Update the versions for everything

Suggest enabling disk crypto directly from the shell, to avoid SSD leaks of the originally PIN-encrypted device key material.

Update the Firewall instructions to clarify that you need to ensure there are no typos in the scripts, and actually click the Droidwall UI button to enable the Droidwall firewall (otherwise networking will not work at all due to userinit.sh).

what are the advantages and disadvanatges (secyrity-wise) of adding a secure socket layer on an onion website? I run an hidden service using non-https connections, what are the advantages and disadvangates of switching to https, like DuckDuckGo's https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion?

The connections to onion sites are secured using RSA 1024, which isn't really satisfying. You can utilize stronger encryption and authenticity by adding an additional TLS layer. By aware that TLS leaks some additional information, like your system time.

1. Why using static IP is more secure? Naturally this doesn't work if the base station is configured to issue dynamic IPs.

2. Since Google doesn't allow Google accounts created through Tor, how exactly we should create them? Is it better to use the actual device (in this case tablet with Tor disabled) or use a third party device?

As explained in the post, a static IP reduces the vulnerability surface by not running dhclient. This is most useful for your cell modem, where you know what your IP range will always be, and you'd rather not risk it handing you maliciously crafted DHCP responses.

1) For privacy is better don't install F-Droid package (that connect to internet everytime), but browse and download applications directly from https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/ (you connect to internet only when you want)

1. To my knowledge F-Droid does not send any unique identifiers, and it is routed over Tor. Using F-Droid is actually more secure than downloading apks, because F-Droid does ensure that apk upgrades use the same official F-Droid key as before (where as adb install does exactly what you tell it: installs a new package). If you download packages yourself, you are also only protected by HTTPS and the CA cartels, which is weaker than a dedicated apk signing key managed by F-Droid.

3. This is a reference prototype, designed to be used to aid in development of a more streamlined ROM or ROM addon package with better UI. We won't be writing another one for other devices unless they have obvious security advantages to the Nexus 7 (such as support by Replicant to remove binary blobs). We certainly won't be writing a guide for cell phones.

Rather, the fdroid client first downloads an index which is signed by the repo maintainer. The client compares downloaded APK checksums with this index. When installing the new APK, the Android OS checks the new signature, just as it does when using ADB.

For the hardware part:
I know, it's a little bit offtopic as this one is not an android phone and it's not already available. But perhaps the Neo900 (https://neo900.org/) is even more interesting as the broadband module is completely separated from the rest of the phone. Not to forget the open design itself.

Completely wiping the baseband partition is also an option. The only side effect on my Samsung N7100 has been a slightly higher power consumption, because the radio chips are now unable to power themselves off.

A. It would seem this does not apply to the Nexus 7. The only service running on my Nexus 7 from that list is com.android.phone. Do you think it is worth disabling?

B. Holy shit. This does still happen on the Nexus 7. I will update the howto with these instructions immediately. These are one time settings, correct? I do not need to place them in the bootup script?

C. This request does not happen on boot for me. Or at least, it does not leak (I have an upstream router monitoring for Tor leaks for testing).

D. This hack does not prevent the transmission of already configured (but unavailable) APs over WiFi, which I believe is a more serious problem. I will add this to future work.

A. It's only for devices burdened with a a baseband. I wouldn't bother disabling com.android.phone etc. on a Nexus 7.

B. Yeah, one time installation only.

C. I wonder what causes that request for me. Did you test on CM11M4 without Gapps as I did?

D. Well, the device will only generate probe requests containing APs if those had a cloaked SSID, i.e. you had to enter their name manually. You can always opt never to connect to such APs, or remove them when they're not needed anymore.

However, while verifying before and after applying these changes, I noticed that these Captive Portal pings were being sent by the Settings service (UID 1000), which should be blocked anyway most of the time. But, since the Settings Service needs to access the network for Google Play setup, I included these changes anyway.

I think disabling the captive portal detection is a still a good idea. Only firewalling it away can cause delays or even connection failures in my experience (depending on Android version and phase of the moon).

I managed to do A on my nexus 5 (hammerhead) by patching the factory images with an empty radio partition, fastboot flashing that and then continuing with installing cyanogen mod as described here. I also disabled all com.qualcom.* services. But the energy consumption is staggering, draining the battery in 12 h (mostly idle) with 77% cell network, and screen in place 2 with 6 %.

This seems dubious. How does the closed source Mac Spoofer app do this, I wonder?

I also did not need a kernel patch to change the MAC address reported by busybox ifconfig wlan0 after doing busybox ifconfig wlan0 hw ether 11:22:33:44:55:66, but doing this did not update the Android system's view of the MAC, and it also broke the ability to associate to access points (which I suspect is not a kernel issue, but an Android WiFi management system issue).

let's elaborate it further, hack the kernel is the best and most reliable way to do, why?

when you turn on Android' wifi buttion, Android OS will issue a get_mac_addr request (only once per switch) to the kernel, if you have hacked the kernel and have the /sysfs randomize_wifi_mac 'echoed 1', the kernel will 'update' the mac addr of the wifi (using the randomizing code I posted) and eveything is then set :)

Each time your toggle your Android wifi button, a new mac_addr is generated & enjoy 24/7 free wifi in any coffee shop/mall !

Do some serious hacking in kernel, different rom has similar but different code...

For brevity I decided to leave this out. The post was already extremely long. If anyone is interested in turning this material into an addon installation package or integrating it into a ROM, I can either provide them with the rationale, or do a second blog post.

Just a suggestion for the MAC thing: you could try patching android-framework.jar to report whatever MAC, UUID, IMEI, ... you want to the apps. This isn't going to change the actual values in the hardware, but at least your Android apps (hopefully including the system ones) won't be able to read the original values in any way.

I look forward to the release of this device. Looks interesting at a glance, however according to the FAQ the baseband will not be open source, but it may be isolated, which is a plus: http://neo900.org/faq

From the FAQ entry, it still have a USB bridge to the OS, which depending on how that's handled, may still be more vulnerability surface (if the host OS can be tricked into treating that USB interface as something other than what it is supposed to be, and loading alternate, potentially vulnerable USB drivers).

The baseband on cell phones is full of backdoors. We know from court proceedings that the baseband can activate your microphone at any time, and this appears to be a built-in "feature" of most cellphone basebands. We also now have proof of much deeper backdoors that allow malware to be planted directly on your device.

It turns out that cell phones do not authenticate the network provider, in part to facilitate roaming. This means nothing prevents any random hacker with a cell network reimplementation from impersonating your cell network provider to exploit these backdoors, and fully compromise your device. (Yes, FOSS implementations of cell networks do exist, and can be deployed with hardware that costs around USD $1000).

Because of this, the Tor Project cannot in good conscience encourage or endorse use of cell-enabled devices in such a way that that would cause people to believe them to be secure. It is up to the individual user to decide if they care about this type of exploitation, and act accordingly.

Ok then another possibly nobish question - Can I buy a tablet with 3g modem built in which has never been acivated, and I never plan to use it (no data plan, no sim card). The question is can RTOS backdoors and exploits still be activated somehow? I suppose it is impossible but asking just in case..

Another commenter mentioned how to wipe the baseband firmware from a device that has one. I do not know if that is sufficient to prevent the baseband hardware from messing with you (or deciding to download a new firmware for you), but it seems better than nothing.

I know that you can intercept cell phones with imsi catcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher
But can you intercept with openbts and your hardware? if yes, how?
(i think that openbts can not intercept, because the software can not forward call traffic through to a mobile operator)

If your goal is to deploy malware through a baseband backdoor, you don't need to forward calls. You just need to get a handset to roam onto your rogue cell network long enough to exploit the backdoor, and then kick them off.

I had to modify the DNS transproxy section of the firewall-tor.sh to get the rules to load on a CM-11 nightly on tilapia. The error was about a duplicate rule in the droidwall chain. Would appreciate a check by someone knowledgeable... I tried to replicate the intent of the original section... but I am no iptables expert. Edited rules follow:

Those were not duplicate rules you deleted. You deleted the source (-s) lines for 127.0.0.1, which are needed because the transproxy sets the destination to a remote IP (or the device IP) in some cases.

I am not sure why you got errors for this. I tested in the CM-11-M4 snapshot version I posted and there were no issues, and non-whitelisted apps are still in fact blocked from accessing the network in my version.

Possibly there is a bug in the newer CM-11 nightly you tried? Might be worth trying to narrow down which nightly the issue appeared in and reporting it to them.

Iptables has such unhelpful error messages... Upon further investigation:

# CONFIG_NETFILTER_XT_MATCH_MULTIPORT is not set

So that's why the multiport match rules fail on my nightly. In lieu of switching to M3 (there's no M4 for tilapia), I ported these rules to the less concise normal port matching syntax. These rules seem to work as expected (only whitelisted apps work and droidwall loads without issue):